UConn Sees Lone Loss as Turning Point in a Championship Season

Geno Auriemma, center, and his players didn't like each other early in the season, but things changed as the season grew older and the effort got more intense.CreditMike Carlson/Getty Images

By Jonathan Czupryn

April 8, 2015

TAMPA, Fla. — Had the Connecticut women’s basketball team initially listened to Coach Geno Auriemma when practices began in October, the Huskies may have very well ended this season on an 84-game winning streak dating to 2013.

Instead, they took the hard road and finished with only 37 straight victories.

UConn (38-1) still captured a national championship with a 63-53 victory over Notre Dame on Tuesday night, and several of its players are returning to Storrs with national awards like the Naismith Trophy and the Nancy Lieberman Award.

The Huskies, having made a habit of perfection over the last 20 years, were forced to re-evaluate their work ethic after their lone blemish this season, an overtime loss at Stanford in November. Did the players want to coast or achieve greatness?

In Auriemma’s eyes, his players chose the former when they started out six months ago.

“This year, I didn’t like them in October, and they didn’t like me, either, because I knew,” Auriemma said Tuesday after he tied the former U.C.L.A. men’s coach John Wooden for the most Division I basketball titles, with 10.

“I knew what we were doing in October and November wasn’t going to be good enough to get what they wanted, which is what they have tonight,” he continued. “But they didn’t want to listen to me. They didn’t want to hear it.”

Advice from Auriemma, a Hall of Fame inductee, usually carries weight, but the eight returning Huskies from 2013-14 may still have taken it for granted. The star-studded group — which included Breanna Stewart, who won her second Naismith Trophy on Tuesday as the national player of the year, and the all-American Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis — thought they knew what needed to be done to repeat.

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Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, left, and the Huskies fell to Stanford in November. They won their next 37 games.CreditMarcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press

They thought they could coast.

“It was never like big, big things; it’s not like they didn’t feel like coming to practice or they were dogging it in games,” Auriemma said, adding, “It was more of, this little detail is really important, and they would tell you by their actions, ‘No, it isn’t.’ ”

Players complained about nearly impossible drills, not realizing the tasks were structured to see how they reacted to difficult situations and not to determine if they could accomplish them.

Auriemma recalled his players murmuring in one practice: “Coach, there’s only four of us on defense, and there’s five of them on offense. How do you expect us to guard them?” He responded: “I know there’s five of them. You’re supposed to figure out how to guard them.”

Last season’s team, which also won a national championship, was not like that, Auriemma said — not even from the beginning. The coaching staff and that squad clicked from Day 1, and as a result, the Huskies finished 39-0.

That team had three bad practices all season. (Auriemma is a stickler for remembering the precise history of his championship groups.) This season’s team averaged about three per week.

And then it lost.

The Huskies’ 48-game winning streak, built by former players like Stefanie Dolson and Bria Hartley, ended Nov. 17 with the loss at Stanford. Dolson and Hartley were not there anymore to pick up the pieces.

That job belonged to the players who thought they were too good for Auriemma’s harsh lessons.

“This was definitely the hardest, I think, because we were the ones that had to lead the team this year,” Mosqueda-Lewis said while tightly holding the championship trophy. “We weren’t the babies anymore. It was kind of in our hands to decide what this team was going to be.”

The Huskies all agreed that the loss to the Cardinal, in their second game, forced them to grow up in a hurry. A December matchup with Notre Dame, the reigning runner-up, was looming only three weeks later in South Bend, Ind.

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Breanna Stewart hugging a teammate after the title game victory.CreditMike Carlson/Getty Images

“A lot of changes were made on our team between the Stanford game and the Notre Dame game,” Auriemma said. “A lot of good stuff happened on our team.”

UConn went undefeated the rest of the way. In fact, the Huskies won each of their contests leading to their title game rematch with the Fighting Irish by at least 14 points, including a 23-point rout of a fellow No. 1 seed, Maryland, in a national semifinal.

Sure, it looked easy from January on, especially to casual fans who saw some of the scores: 100-45, 85-26, 105-54.

But to Moriah Jefferson, a junior who won the Nancy Lieberman Award on Monday as the nation’s top point guard, and her teammates, this season was the most difficult journey they had experienced.

“Like I said time and time again, people haven’t seen our practice,” Jefferson said. “It was so hard throughout the whole entire year, and I don’t think people realize it. They see some of the scores, but they don’t see the struggles that we go through.”

UConn’s final struggle might have been its most daunting.

The squad hoisted Auriemma and carried him to the stage to accept the trophy, a tradition that began in 1995, when the Huskies won their first title.

“Every year since then it’s become less enjoyable because back then, they were overjoyed at the fact that they could carry me off,” Auriemma said. Now when they pick him up, they “moan how heavy I am,” he said.

He added, “I make it worse because I kind of just lay there like a stone.”

Auriemma never makes it easy, even in celebration.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: Streak-Ending Loss Also Snapped Connecticut Out of Complacency. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe